After Amazon pulled the plug on WikiLeaks" hosting solution with the company, others soon followed suit. PayPal announced that they have cut off donation support for the whistleblowing site, and on Monday, MasterCard took the same stance as PayPal. Internet hacktivist group Anonymous decided to have their say in supporting WikiLeaks by DDoSing PayPal and MasterCard.
Neowin earlier today reported on several attacks to banking websites that were blocking donations to the WikiLeaks organization. Now, Anonymous has issued distributed denial of service attacks onto credit card site MasterCard after they stopped donation support for WikiLeaks as well. Attempts to reach MasterCard"s main site are, at the time of this writing, met with either extremely long load times or a connection timeout.
Early this morning, the group Anon tweeted from @Anon_Operation this message: "WE ARE GLAD TO TELL YOU THAT https://www.mastercard.com/ is DOWN AND IT"S CONFIRMED." Twitter is also now a target for Anonymous as the social networking website reportedly are preventing the #wikileaks tag from showing up among trending topics.
While Anonymous is simply trying to get a point across, many innocent bystanders are getting caught in the crossfire. Users of MasterCard are not currently able to use the online services provided by the credit card company. With the arrest of Julian Assange, Anonymous has seemingly stepped up to fill in the hole and add support to the whistleblowing organization.
MasterCard does want to let users know that they "are working to restore normal speed of service. There is no impact whatsoever on Mastercard or Maestro cardholders" ability to use their cards for secure transactions." Anonymous has recently stepped up in number of attacks issued, from the recent takedown of the RIAA and MPAA websites, to the major banking and credit service websites highlighted in the past few days.